Did Wraith and Chappa’ai add-ons just install themselves automatically in your Kodi? You were probably presented with a prompt like this…

“Update players: Do you want to remove your existing players first?”

Update Players – Do you want to remove your existing players first

I immediately noticed these 2 new add-ons were installed…

This happened to all of my devices running Kodi, and honestly, it was a bit alarming! How could these add-ons just install themselves like that when I didn’t install them? Was my Kodi hacked or something?

Well, I found some answers.

How Blamo Pushed Wraith and Chappa’ai

Basically, people who have the Blamo repository version 0.1.3 from http://repo.mrblamo.xyz are getting pushed to use Wraith and Chappa’ai without any notice.

That means if you one of the following add-ons installed from the Blamo repo, then you automatically got Wraith and Chappa’ai.

Neptune Rising

Death Streams

Placenta

So, how were they able to push these add-ons automatically? The developer, Mr. Blamo made use of a feature of Kodi add-ons called dependencies to automatically install these add-ons which have been marked as dependencies of his other add-ons.

Also, it’s important to note that these are not necessarily completely new add-ons, but you may have had one or both of these installed before under their previous names…

Extended Info Mod updated to Wraith

MetalliQ updated to Chappa’ai

Even people who had the original Extended Info Mod from Q with auto-update turned off found that it got updated to Wraith because of this dependency.

Here is the Wraith change log that shows a major version bump to overwrite Kodi’s version and also a note in there about how to go back to the official Extended Info.

What are Wraith and Chappa’ai?

Wraith serves as an interface to some popular playlists to peruse content. Once your content is selected, you can then select which installed and compatible add-on you wish to use to search for your links.

Wraith also installs the MetalliQ fork called Chappa’ai, which can be used to search ALL installed and compatible add-ons for most links. So, instead of choosing one of your many add-ons and then finding a show or movie to watch, you can start with Wraith and Chappa’ai to find the show or movie, hit play, and it will give you a prompt to let you choose which add-on to play it from. It’s actually pretty cool.

Some setup tips: Enter TMDB API key for maximum effect, and be sure to install the add-on from the program folder of the repo. It will auto configure as it install for the first time, but you can tweak the settings later.

My Opinion on Wraith

I spent some time trying these out. Here are my thoughts.

Wraith is actually really nice if you like being able to browse the cast, crew, related YouTube videos, official videos, posters, fan art, etc. You can pretty much go down the rabbit hole exploring the cast to see what else they’ve acted in.

The custom browsing interface that Wraith uses on the All Movies and All TV Shows screens is pretty cool. It has an infinite scroll feature so when you reach the bottom of a page it loads more and puts your selection at the top. On the other hand, this interface is not used on any of the other screens, so what’s the point? Who would browse ALL movies or TV shows?

My Opinion on Chappa’ai

Chappa’ai, like its predecessor MetalliQ, is kind of revolutionary in the way that it brings all your different add-ons together. You can use Chappa’ai as the front-end to browse to what you want to watch, and it uses all your add-ons as the back-end to actually search for streams to play it.

However, what I don’t like very much is the Trakt integration. While these do have integration with Trakt.tv, it doesn’t seem to have a way to browse my “Lists”. Here’s what Chappa’ai has under TV Shows > Use your Trakt

See, I have a particular setup which I enjoy very much which includes 3 different lists of shows (Kids Shows, Family Shows, and Dad Shows). I use the Trakt.tv website on my phone to add shows to the appropriate lists when I hear about them, then they automatically appear on all my Kodi devices and all the progress and watched statuses are synced across all devices. In other add-ons like all Gaia, Covenant and all of its forks, I can browse each list separately. Chappa’ai appears to only have the ability to browse the entire collection or the watchlist.

Also, in Chappa’ai, when I browse to “next episodes” and click on one, it just starts searching other add-ons for that episode. In those other add-ons, I can browse “next episodes” or “progress” which actually brings me to the list of all the next episodes for a show when I click on one show. I like this because it allows me to see how many episodes I am behind. Here is an example of when I click on an episode from the TV Shows > My TV Shows > Progress screen of Neptune Rising…

One more thing, I want to take a step back and look at the whole purpose of Chappa’ai.

I see that the main purpose of Chappa’ai is to prevent you from going into an add-on, searching for a show, getting no streams available, and then having to switch to another add-on to do the same thing. If using Chappa’ai, then if you don’t get streams with one add-on, you just click on another add-on and it send the same show query to that one. Just one click. That’s great!

However, is it overkill? If you’re using Real-Debrid like me, you don’t ever get “No stream available” so why the extra step of going through Chappa’ai.

Chappa’ai can also slow down your Kodi especially if you have a lot of add-ons installed. Just something else to keep in mind.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I know, some are kind of petty, but it’s those little things that make me not want to change the way I setup Kodi.

*KinkeadTech has no affiliation with Kodi, any add-ons, repos, or builds. KinkeadTech.com is a news and informational website which does not support or condone copyright infringement. Kodi should only be used with content that is bought and owned personally or is in the public domain.